Rot
by The Full Catastrophe
Summary: In the middle of a fight against Technus, Danny is tossed through a ghost portal into another dimension. In trying to get back to his own world, he encounters two major obstacles: one, there's no Fenton Portal, and two, it's the Zombie Apocalypse. Welcome to Earth Z.
1. Prologue

**Danny Phantom in "The Multiverse"**

 **Book One: Rot**

 ** _Prologue_**

Green mist swirled through the otherwise empty sky of the Ghost Zone. In the oldest, most vacant corners of the Zone, the atmosphere was black and cold – well, colder than usual. The feeling that this was a world for the dead could not be ignored, not here.

"So," said Danny. His voice was loud, echoing in the silence. "You're saying that thousands of years ago, ghost _bugs_ were the big bad in the Zone?"

Clockwork, body bent and gnarled in the form of an old man, flew next to Danny. His red eye gleamed. "Not just the Zone. They were a menace to the human world as well. Luckily at that time, humans knew how to protect themselves against ghosts."

"The ghost bugs got a kick out of scaring the humans?"

"They _ate_ the humans."

For a moment, Danny froze midair. Clockwork drifted a few feet ahead and waited for Danny to recover. The ghost boy shuddered and slowly rejoined his companion. "That's sick," he said in a quiet voice. He'd heard of ghosts that wanted to terrorize humans, enslave them, extort them, and even kill them, but never something like this. Why?

He asked it. "Why?"

Clockwork smirked coldly. "Some say they liked the taste. The truth is they were able to metabolize the human soul, converting it into ectoplasmic energy. It made them strong."

Danny was quiet for a long time. They continued to fly through the blackening world. Very little existed in it. Here and there were chunks of rock and dilapidated, ancient buildings. There were no doors. No portals.

Uncomfortable, Danny changed the subject. "I'd say this place was like a ghost town, but that's exactly what it's not like. Where are we going?"

"Call it 'study abroad'."

Cryptic, as usual. Danny rolled his eyes and tried to stay the shivers threatening to scuttle across his body.

After some minutes more of flying through the monotonous landscape, they arrived at a large chunk of gray rock. Its body was bulbous and jagged, and its bottom fell away in a sharp tooth of stone. They circled around to its opposite side, where there was an opening – a cave. The entrance, totally black and impenetrable by the eye, was guarded by posts of green flame. It was the most color Danny had seen in the last hour.

"We're not going in there, are we?" said Danny.

Clockwork did not respond, but merely flew between the flame pillars and into the blackness, his staff lighting his way. Danny summoned a ball of ectoplasmic energy into his fist and reluctantly followed.

Even for the Ghost Zone, even for Danny with his ice core, the cave was cold. Part of him wondered if it was truly the temperature he was feeling or if the coldness was something felt deeper than the skin. There was malevolence in this place. Was he feeling the chill of evil?

Though he tried to fight it, Danny began to shiver, so violently in fact that his teeth chattered. He slowed his flight to a halt, let his light evaporate, and hugged himself, rubbing his arms. Clockwork came back to him, bringing Danny back into the halo of his time staff.

"Y-y-you d-d-don't f-f-f-f-eel this?"

"It's because you're human," said the ghost. "Your soul knows there's a predator nearby, even if your mind doesn't."

Danny frowned, but he finally got the point. "Th-there's a b-b-bug here?" His core trilled, shot through with cold.

"Embrace your ghost half, if you can," said Clockwork. "It will help."

Danny barely knew what that meant, but he tried to do it anyway. He closed his eyes and sought out his ghost core, the energy at the center of his being that he always reached for when he wanted to transform into Phantom. Just like those times, he tugged at it with his mind, pulling tendrils of cold, bright energy from it, like stoking a fire. And just like stoking a fire, it crackled and grew, expanding and filling Danny with power. Meanwhile, the unbearable cold loosened its grip on him and faded away.

Danny opened his eyes. Although he felt strangely numb, he did feel better. "It worked."

Clockwork smiled slightly. "Come." He turned and continued into the cave. Danny created another ball of energy, and noted that it came effortlessly. He barely had to think about it.

They continued into the cave through an increasingly narrow passage. Danny's awareness was taut and alert, and he half expected to be attacked any second. He had to remind himself that with the Master of Time at his side, he probably didn't need to be so cautious.

Then again, Clockwork didn't always place Danny's safety as a top priority.

Eventually the tunnel ended in a chamber. Here, the blackness was almost tangible; their lights did little more than to reveal the dark to them. Clockwork waved his staff, and like fog the darkness was swept into the corners of the cave.

There was a dark shape ahead. A lump of blackness somehow blacker than the stuff around it. Clockwork led Danny towards it, casting his light over it. Danny's eyes widened.

It was a creature, bound tightly to the floor by numerous chains. Under the dull gleam of the metal, an ugly green and gray carapace could be seen. Where the tight bindings cut into the corpse, the shell was crushed, and bits of it had fallen away to litter the floor nearby.

At least, Danny had thought it was a corpse. Shortly after Clockwork illuminated it, it began to move, aware of their presence in its long prison. The legs twitched, crackling like thunder in the silence. The dull shell of an eye lit up with green energy at its center, twinkling in the many facets of the orb. Its withered antennae tasted the air.

Danny recoiled from it, floating straight back into the Master of Time. He frowned apologetically at Clockwork but remained so close to the ghost that they were practically rubbing elbows.

"It's alive," Danny stated, dumbfounded.

"Yes," said Clockwork simply.

"Why is it alive? If these things are so dangerous, why is this one still alive?"

Clockwork's customary grimace deepened. "It took the sacrifice of thousands of the Ancient Ones to eradicate these abominations from the Ghost and Human Realms. Few ghosts have such a sharp memory as I do, so this creature that you see in front of you was preserved here as a reminder."

"A reminder?" echoed Danny. "Of what?"

"That even ghosts can die."

The withered bug, the memento mori bound in chains, suddenly snapped the green light of its gaze onto Danny. Its body shuddered, its wings buzzed, and it hissed. Danny could feel the noises rattling through his bones, buzzing in his brain, filling his entire being and paralyzing him to his core.

And behind the crazed intelligence gleaming in its eye, Danny could sense something else, powerful, frightening and inextricable, something he had never felt directed at himself, something that made him feel like insignificant prey being stalked by a primordial predator:

 _Hunger_.

* * *

 _A/N: Am I doing this? Yes. Yes, I am._

 _I know I've started a couple other stories on here and didn't get very far with them, but in terms of stories that are my babies, Treading Water is my firstborn and "The Multiverse" is its little brother. Just like TW, it is a massive, complex, and overly ambitious story, but unlike TW, it's not funny at all. It's actually pretty bleak? Lots of death and horrible things happening to our characters. I love it. Book One here is called "Rot", and Book Two will be "Hunger"._

 _I've been working on this bad boy since 2017, and now that I'm officially back in business, I decided it was time for it to finally see the light of day._

 _Chapter One is finished and will be up next Monday. (Treading Water Chp 26 is about 10% done and will probably go up this weekend.)_

 _Read, review, enjoy._

 _T.F.C~_


	2. Chapter 1

_**Chapter One**_

Danny knew from the tingling rushing over his body that he had just been thrown through a ghost portal. He cartwheeled through the air several times before he was able to regain control of his flight. When he could tell up from down again, he spun to find the portal so that he could get back through it and back to kicking Technus's butt –

\- only to see the ectoplasmic green disk swiftly vanishing. Now, no bigger than a fist. Now, winking out of sight.

"Crud." Danny sighed and ran his hands through his hair. There was no telling where or even when he had ended up, or if the portal would ever reappear. That was the thing with natural portals; while some were regularly occurring features of the 4-D universe, most worked without any apparent rhyme or reason. Without the Infi-Map – which Danny _was_ without – they were nearly impossible to navigate.

He'd have to figure out where (and when) he was and search for a familiar landmark he could use to find another portal to return to the Ghost Zone. Once there, since the Zone existed outside of normal time – or so he thought; Clockwork had explained the physics of the Ghost Zone to Danny once, and the only result had been a massive headache on Danny's part – Danny was basically home free.

Danny let his eyes wander over his surroundings. He seemed to be in a big city, but he was in a dilapidated part of town. All around him, windows were dark or broken, as were cars on the street far below. Trash and other detritus littered the pavement, and a rank smell hung in the still air.

And it was too quiet. Danny couldn't see people anywhere, but it was more than that. The sounds one would associate with a big city were absent – no rush of cars, no whir of electricity and ACs battling the summer heat.

Danny drifted farther into the air to get a better view; after all, it might have been that he was in a run down and totally abandoned part of town. But, the higher he flew and the more he saw, the worse the situation appeared.

He _was_ in a big city, but it was the remains of a city, not a thriving metropolis. He was downtown; the once glorious skyscrapers were in various states of disrepair, from having shattered windows to being little more than burnt husks of twisted metal. Cars were piled against each other in the street below, absent of their drivers, covered in dust and debris. And there –

Danny gasped and dropped several feet through the air in shock. There were tanks in the streets. Hastily erected barriers. Craters in the asphalt where bombs had been dropped. He was floating above a war zone. A war zone where no one had survived, not even to make a retreat.

Danny felt a chill, which rarely happened since ghosts were so cold to begin with. He chewed his lip as his mind ran through the possibilities of where he could be. The tanks were American. It looked like modern times. His first thought was that this was the alternate timeline where Dan Phantom had effectively wiped out all of humanity. In which case, it was somewhere he _really_ didn't want to be.

He needed to know. Cautiously and slowly, Danny drifted to the ground. If he could find a clue as to what happened here – a newspaper, anything! – he could evaluate his immediate level of danger in this reality.

Danny landed on a street one over from the remains of the military's firefight. He was in the business district, and just as he'd hoped, there was a box outside of a monolithic bank that was selling newspapers for fifty cents. He skipped the quarters and took one with an intangible hand, certain no one would ever know.

"Minneapolis," he whispered. This was only three hours by car away from Amity Park. Too, too close. His eyes roved for the date – and they froze on it, pulled wide. This newspaper wasn't from the future. This was two years ago.

According to Clockwork, multiple timelines existed outside of Danny's. Ones in which events happened and choices were made that didn't happen in others and changed the entire course of history. For the most part, history was like a river, moving inevitably forward. A person could make any number of decisions and the course of history would remain essentially the same. But big events were like boulders tossed in the water, forcing the river to split, and more often than not, those tributaries of history would never join together again.

So, was this an alternate timeline after all? What had happened? Was it Dan?

He dragged his eyes from the date and scanned the paper. Words like 'evacuation', 'last resort', 'collapse', and 'thousands dead' jumped out at him. The picture that took up the top of the front page was of a hospital burning, and in front of it, hundreds of dead bodies wrapped in sheets, piled four-deep in the parking lot.

Had he been in his human form, he might have thrown up. As it were, he drew on the emotional numbness of his ghost core to keep from having a nervous breakdown. Paper gripped tight in his fist, Danny looked up and around. There was no one on the street, but through the foggy, dirty windows of the vehicles, he could see shapes. Dead bodies. And bones and rags on the ground, long since picked through by whatever scavengers had come across the corpses.

This was something from a horror movie. A modern day plague. The end of the world.

He had to get out of here. He just needed to find a portal, and get home, and –

A noise interrupted his thoughts. It was the clink of glass on asphalt, a bottle rattling over the street. Danny whipped around toward the sound, and immediately wished he hadn't.

The figure shuffling towards him was nothing more than the withered shell of a human being. Its torn clothing was stained with blood, its skin turned grey and wrinkled from a long decomposition; it was missing its left arm, and one of its feet dragged uselessly behind it. With empty, foggy eyes, it stared at Danny and gnashed its teeth. Maybe, once, it had been a woman.

Danny stood uselessly in the street, watching the creature get closer to him. It wasn't until the monster was close enough to reach out its hand and touch him that he regained his senses, turned intangible, and shot into the air like a bullet.

Only when he was in the suburbs did he slow down. But he didn't stop flying away from there.

"Zombies," he said, voice flat. He couldn't believe it. Then again, why was it so hard to believe? He'd fought ghosts for the past two years – in fact he _was_ a ghost. He'd traveled through time and changed reality itself on multiple occasions. So, why not zombies?

Maybe it was because with zombies people never won. Danny had seen enough zombie films to know that. And if Minneapolis was any proof, reality didn't differ much from the world people had imagined in their darkest nightmares. The world people had paid money to see, enjoying it in the way people were always fascinated with the macabre. If only they _knew_ – if only they could _see_ –

Danny sped up. Despite himself, ectoplasmic tears were streaming from his eyes and leaving a trail in the air behind him. He had to find the Ghost Portal. He had to get home.

Danny flew nonstop to Amity Park. It was somewhere he was always able to find his way to, like he had an internal homing beacon. He tried not to look at the ground below, the destruction he passed over, but at one point, flying over a horde thousands deep, he couldn't help but stare. Even where he was, hundreds of feet in the air, he could hear their collective moans as they pressed forward south across the countryside. He no longer had hope that Minneapolis was an isolated case. Of course it wasn't. This plague had reached everywhere. The world was really over.

In less than an hour, Amity Park rose among the trees. Danny could see it from miles away, encased by a bright green ghost shield.

Danny frowned when he saw that. Why was there a ghost shield around Amity Park in the middle of the zombie apocalypse? Had his parents done what they always did and pointed the finger at ghosts? To be honest, had zombies suddenly appeared in _his_ world, Danny would have looked to ghosts for the cause, too. Ghosts were always the cause. Heck, maybe even now, ghosts were the cause.

The question was, did ghost shields stop zombies?

When he reached Amity Park, Danny turned himself invisible before anyone could spot him and drew close to get a better look at the shield. It was about a mile in diameter; at its center was Fentonworks, so the device itself was probably in the OP Center. All around the perimeter, Amity Park was in disrepair. Fires had taken out some buildings, while others had been looted. Inside the shield, however, there were people. Danny could see them, on the streets, farming in backyards converted into gardens, manning the perimeter, especially at four metal gateways that had been built at the cardinal points, and on the tops of buildings that stuck out through the curvature of the shield.

"Thank god," Danny breathed. He had seen one decimated Amity Park already, and that was more than he cared for. He was proud of his city, the one he had struggled for so long to protect, for being able to protect itself – to survive.

He suddenly thought about the date on the newspaper he had found. The collapse of Minneapolis had been _before_ his accident in the Fenton Portal. Did that mean he'd never gotten his powers in this universe? Had the Portal even been built?

Danny shook his head. He couldn't think that way. The Portal _had_ to exist. It was his way home.

He looked for a place to land and was relieved when he saw multiple zombies banging fists on the ghost shield and walking into the seemingly solid barrier. The shield, whatever his parents had done to it, obviously worked. Danny chose a spot that seemed safe and landed behind a tree. He changed back into his human form, checked again for zombies and for human guards, and ran toward the shield.

He was not expecting to hit a wall and fall back on his butt. Rubbing his smarting face, Danny climbed to his feet and eyed the barrier. So, not only was this a ghost shield, but by turning it against zombies his parents had turned it into a human shield, too? He had to say, he was impressed. Although it did make things more difficult for him. He had been hoping to get in and slip undetected into the Fentonworks basement. That wasn't going to happen now.

Still human, Danny turned invisible again and jumped into the air, using his now-limited flight powers to float around the perimeter to one of the gates. He didn't want to risk the telltale flash of his transformation being spotted by anyone, living or dead. He passed by two gates before he found what he was looking for. Here was a gate with relatively few zombies, but more than that, he recognized the gate's operator. It was Damon Gray.

Danny dropped to the ground behind an abandoned car, took a deep breath, and let go of the invisibility. Then he made a run for the gate, shouting and waving his arms, aware all the while of the zombies whose attentions he'd just captured. There were eight of them. "Let me in!"

He saw Mr. Gray's shocked expression, the comprehension, the decision. The man grabbed a gun and hit a button, and the shield that ran inside of the metal doorway vanished. Damon shot the zombies that were nearest Danny, his silenced gun taking them down with quiet 'thunk!'s. "Hurry up!" he demanded. Danny could honestly say he had never run faster in his life. He hit the threshold and kept going.

Damon closed the gate as soon as he was through. Danny stopped, turned, and, bent over panting, smiled weakly at the man. "Thanks."

Damon Gray – a person Danny had once thought of as 'my girlfriend's dad' – looked very different from how Danny remembered him. He was thinner, and his hair had much more gray in it. His clothes weren't dirty, but they were old and faded, and there was a scar that stretched across the right side of his face. Currently, he was gaping at Danny, eyes bugging from his face in disbelief.

"You," he whispered. "You're supposed to be dead."

Danny's gut wrenched, and it took every part of his heroic stoicism to keep from reacting. "I'm obviously not," he said, spreading his arms.

"Your parents said you'd turned."

So by _dead_ , he had meant _living dead_. That was awful. That was literally the worst. It must have been that the Danny in this world had never gotten his powers. Had this Danny been half-ghost, there was no way he would have been defeated by zombies. It was simple – ghosts could fly, zombies couldn't. Ghosts could become intangible, zombies couldn't. Pit a ghost against a zombie, and the ghost would always win. Danny didn't even need to fight a zombie to know this was true. (The fact that he and his friends had spent the better part of an evening after watching Dead Teacher IV discussing who would win in a fight, Danny or the Dead Teacher, also might have had something to do with his conviction.)

In that case, if Danny Fenton had never gotten his ghost powers, of course he was dead. Danny remembered the weakling he had been before he became a halfa, and that Fenton could never have survived in a world like this. To say the knowledge made him sad was a gross understatement. He didn't even want to think about it.

"Oh," he finally stammered. "I… I don't know what my parents saw, but they were clearly mistaken." Another thought struck him. He practically pounced on the former Axion Labs employee. "Are they here? Are they okay?"

"They're fine," said Damon. He still seemed flustered to be seeing someone he had presumed dead standing in front of him, walking and talking and using words other than 'brains'. "Should I call them? Your mom's just at the western gate."

Danny really didn't think that was a good idea. By revealing himself to Mr. Gray, he was already interfering in a dangerous way. He was starting to change this world, and that was, more often than not, a bad thing to do. The only time it had helped to Danny's knowledge was when he had stopped his evil future self. But, if he didn't meet his parents, Damon would tell them he had seen Danny, which would either horribly upset the Fentons or cause Damon to be labeled a madman.

"Uh, sure," said Danny prematurely, mostly because Damon was staring at him and waiting for an answer. He immediately wished there was a wall nearby which he could slam his forehead into. Jack and Maddie Fenton had seen him – or rather, their son – turn into a zombie. In what world would meeting him _not_ upset them? And just how was he supposed to explain?

 _Just tell them the truth. They'll help you get home._

Well, that was a new idea. Tell his parents the truth. When was the last time he'd done that?

It was looking like the only option right now. He had no idea what the situation was in this world, and any lies he tried to spin would surely weave a rope more likely to strangle him than rescue him.

Damon raised a handheld radio to his mouth. "Maddie? You there?"

The device crackled, and Danny could hear his mother's voice: " _Damon? Is something wrong?"_

"No, no," he assured her, eyeing Danny. "Nothing's wrong. But you'll want to get over here. It's, well, it's Danny."

For a long moment, there was no sound from the radio. " _I understand. I'll be right there."_ Her voice was dull, all emotion carefully drained from it.

"You might have done a better job explaining," Danny pointed out. When Damon raised a brow at him, he shrugged. "Just saying."

Within minutes, Maddie Fenton jogged out from a side street onto the road that led to the gate. Her pace was neither hurried nor did it drag, but when she spotted Danny, standing sheepishly next to Damon Gray, kicking his toe into the pavement and trying to look at her without looking at her, she slowed to a stop. Like always, she was wearing her turquoise hazmat suit, hood raised. Maddie lifted a shaking hand to remove her goggles and slide the hood back. Even from this distance, Danny could see that her hair was faded and that her face was much more worn than his own mother's. The last few years had taken their toll on her.

She gaped at the phantom of her son. "Danny?" she whispered. She approached him slowly, and then with sudden speed grabbed his shoulders and forced him to look at her. She took his chin and turned his face in every direction, scouring it with her eyes. "How?" she asked him. "How?" And the next thing he knew, she was hugging him tightly, sobbing into the top of his head.

Hesitantly, Danny raised shaking arms to wrap around his parallel universe mother. His eyes burned with tears, and soon they were making hot trails over his cheeks. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, voice hoarse. _I'm so sorry your son died. I'm so sorry I look like him. I'm so sorry that I'm_ not _your son._ He closed his eyes. He didn't want to deal with this. It didn't matter that this wasn't his timeline. This was real.

When Maddie had calmed down enough to speak, she took Danny by the shoulders again and searched his face, as though looking for an explanation. "How is this possible? I saw you – I _saw_ you…"

"I-" Danny started, and he stopped. He couldn't bring himself to look at her, at the frantic, desperate intensity in her countenance. Her hands squeezed him so tightly it was as if she was afraid to let go, like by letting go her son would be gone again, vanishing like a mirage into the hot summer air. So instead Danny dropped his gaze to the ground.

He fumbled over what to say. At last he glanced at Damon Gray, who was observing their interactions with polite but obvious curiosity. "Can we speak in private? I mean," he added, seeing Damon was offended, "maybe it's better if I tell you and Dad at the same time. It's a, uh, long story." That would at least buy him a few minutes to come up with a plan.

Maddie's gaze lingered; at last she nodded. "Of course. Let's go. Let's go this instant. He should be back at the house." She inclined her head at Damon Gray, who nodded back, clearly disappointed. Then, together with her 'son', they set off toward Fentonworks.

Danny followed at her side, looking everywhere but at his alternate universe mother. He observed the changes that had been made to the community around Fentonworks; saw people living in houses that weren't theirs, saw a memorial where there had once been a park. The streets were clear of cars, and there seemed to be no electricity. Windows were open to let in fresh air and relieve the heat of summer.

"It looks different, doesn't it?" Maddie said after a few minutes. Danny jumped and spun toward her, thinking for a second that she had figured it out. She frowned at his stricken expression and explained, "You haven't been back to Amity Park since before this all started. A lot changed."

"Right," he said, dropping his gaze again. "Yeah." And again, he was aware of her observing him closely. He tried not to squirm. Instead, he looked even more pointedly at their surroundings.

"You don't look like you've been in the wilderness all this time," Maddie pointed out.

"Um…" he said.

"Your clothes look new. You're well-fed. You look well-rested."

"Like I said," Danny evaded. "Long story."

"Hmm," said Maddie. Silence stretched between them again, all the way until they reached Fentonworks.

Fentonworks had, for the most part, not changed at all. Some of the newer additions to the OP Center were missing – some of the more advanced ghost weaponry that had been built in the wake of Pariah Dark's invasion – and Danny could see the beam of light that marked the ghost shield's power source stretching into the air above the Center. Otherwise, it could have been _his_ house. Maddie led him inside, and he was again amazed; there was air conditioning and electricity.

"I forgot," he said excitedly. "The Fenton Generator. That's how you've kept the shield up for so long. It runs on purified ectoplasm, which is practically inexhaustible."

His alternate mother raised a brow and smiled slightly. "And all these years I thought you were never paying attention."

Danny rubbed the back of his neck, feeling himself blush. It was true – when he was younger, he had thought everything with the name 'Fenton' slapped in front of it was bogus. It wasn't until he started using his parents' inventions, and was often on the receiving end of said inventions, that he started to take a very close interest in their work. "Er… I guess I absorbed a lot. I just never thought the FenGen could be used for anything other than charging cellphones during power outages, you know? This is amazing."

"I'm glad you think so. In fact, we've been supplementing the purified ectoplasm with solar energy to stretch its usage."

"Are there solar panels on the OP Center now?" he asked, excitement growing.

"There are," said Maddie. "We were able to salvage some from Axion - or what's left of it - but the others were thrown together using whatever we could find lying around town." Danny grinned openly; he forgot how brilliant his parents were sometimes. They weren't just ghost hunters. They were scientists and top-class inventors. What else had they built to combat the zombie apocalypse?

Maddie continued to smile softly at him, but the expression was tinged with sadness and deep confusion. "You…" she started, but she changed her mind and turned toward the kitchen. "I think your father's in the lab. Are you ready?"

"Uh, yeah," said Danny. He tried not to imagine his dad's reaction; he knew whatever his mind came up with would be nothing compared to the real thing. Cautiously, he followed his mom down the stairs into the lab.

There was his dad – his alternate self's dad – hunched over a bench, fiddling with some invention for which the purpose was, at the moment, unrecognizable. He seemed smaller than before, and his hair, like Maddie's, was grayer and ill-kempt.

"Jack," Maddie called softly. Already her voice was cracking with emotion. "We found Danny." Jack's shoulders dropped, and he sighed wearily. As he turned, though, his wife continued: "He's alive."

Despair was wrapping its cold fingers around Danny's heart. He could hardly breathe, and it wasn't just because Jack was squeezing him tightly and swinging him through the air. It was the way Jack's knees had almost given out seeing him, and the sheer joy in the man's eyes that Danny knew he would have to extinguish again. And it was also because, over Jack's shoulder, the opposite wall of the lab was clearly visible, and where there should have been a Ghost Portal, there was nothing but a hole full of metal scraps and hanging wires. Parts had obviously been salvaged from it and repurposed, leaving it _months_ away from being finished.

Too soon, Jack released him, and both of his alternate self's – his _dead_ alternate self's – parents were looking at him with their expectant, teary eyes. His heart pounded, and his blood roared through his ears. Why did he have to do this?

His mind scrabbled for a lie he could use so that he wouldn't have to break their hearts. But every lie he created was just as quickly unraveled. He simply didn't have enough information to work with. There were too many unknowns, and even 'amnesia' couldn't account for them. Eventually, too, he would have to leave them, and then the truth would be more painful than ever. Danny couldn't let them believe their son was alive. Not for a second longer.

He took a deep, shuddering breathe. His eyes dropped to the floor. He felt _guilty_. "You might want to sit down." Maddie and Jack both looked confused, but when they realized he wouldn't continue, they found some chairs and did as he asked.

Danny crossed his arms and rubbed his elbows nervously. He took another deep breath. "I don't know what you saw, but whatever it was probably actually happened. Your son turned into a, uh, zombie. He's dead."

"What're you-" Jack started to say, but Danny cut in.

"This will be hard to believe, but I'm not your son. Not really. I mean, I'm Danny Fenton, but I'm the Danny Fenton from an alternate timeline where whatever terrible thing happened here _didn't_ happen."

He knew he could ramble on for several minutes more, but what he had said so far just about covered it, so Danny stopped and raised his head to wait for their reactions.

"This is an awful thing to joke about," said Maddie. Her expression could have curdled milk.

"You think I'm joking," said Danny, briefly disbelieving. He shook his head. "Of course you do. What I'm saying sounds insane. Everything about this is insane." He ran a hand through his hair, trying quickly to think of a way to prove he was telling the truth.

 _Show them your ghost powers_. Or, don't. Jack and Maddie Fenton hated ghosts, and now he didn't even have the shield of being their son to protect him. That was a card he would keep up his sleeve as long as possible.

 _Talk. Keep talking. Draw pictures. Use science. They speak science._

"Look-" Danny dug through lab equipment that had been shoved against one wall and abandoned. He cleared a path for a white board and wheeled it in front of his alternate timeline parents. There was a black marker attached with a magnet, which Danny used to dash thick black lines onto the board with desperate 'squeak's.

"This is your timeline. This circle is now. This 'x' is when the zombie apocalypse started, as far as I can tell. Okay. Now this line up here is _my_ timeline. Everything up until the 'x' is probably the same. But, no zombie apocalypse. Instead, other things happen, like – you two finish building the Fenton Portal; Amity Park has a ghost invasion; Vlad Masters becomes mayor; and so on. Up until this circle – my world's now.

"So now, you're probably wondering how I got here. There's actually a very simple explanation – the Ghost Zone. As you know, or have at least theorized, the Zone is an alternate dimension that exists only thinly inside our world's space and time, and there are natural portals that sometimes open between it and our world. What you might not know is that some of those portals open up in different time periods– the past or the future – and sometimes even alternate timelines to our own…"

At this point, Danny drew a circle between the two timelines and a small stick-figure cartoon of himself dropping through the circle from one line to the other. "And I think that's what happened to me. I was just minding my own business when suddenly a natural portal appears out of nowhere, I fall through it, and then there's zombies, everyone is dead, and the world is over."

He shoved the cap back on the marker and stuck it back on the board. Danny realized his hands were shaking, so he clasped them tightly as he turned back to his alternate self's folks.

"I know it sounds insane, but actually I'm really freaking out here," and his voice chose then to crack as though to prove it, "and if you – the best paranormal scientists in the world – don't believe me, I don't know what else I should…"

Silently, Maddie stood and walked over to him and the white board. She looked at his rudimentary sketches and then at him, eyes expressionless, calculating. She took him by the arm and looked hard into his eyes; Danny couldn't help but flinch under the intensity of her gaze. "Our son is really dead?"

Danny squeezed his eyes shut. His voice refused to work anymore, and so he nodded his head.

Maddie released his arm and stumbled back toward her chair; Jack, horrified, was there to steady her and help her sit down again.

"I'm sorry," Danny whispered at the floor. "I didn't mean to… I didn't know where else to go…"

"You should wait upstairs," said Jack, voice empty. Danny nodded helplessly and took his escape.

* * *

 _A/N: Did I say Monday? I really meant I would update on Saturday! Same difference, right? And look - zombies! Also... Danny Fenton is dead?! Oh noes!_

 _I'm actually a big fan of zombie stories. Walking Dead, Z Nation, Rot and Ruin, Warm Bodies, Raising Stony Mayhall, The Girl with All the Gifts, 28 Days Later, Boyfriend of the Dead, Sankarea, Apocalypse no Toride. I think about zombies so much, I even regularly have zombie dreams. Maybe zombies have been overdone now, along with a lot of apocalyptic themes. But, hey, I'm still having fun with them. :D_

 _Chapter Two is about 60% written, as are most of the chapters from this point forward. You know how it is - you write a scene here, write a scene there, write a scene from the end of the story. I've got about 30,000 words total written, but not necessarily consecutively. So, look for Chapter Two in the next couple of weeks._

 _Thanks to : Foxprints, SofiPhan29, and Black Sun Upon An Icy Sky for their reviews, and to everyone who's added this to their alerts (and even fav'd the prologue?! Wut?)_

 _T.F.C~_


	3. Chapter 2

_**Chapter Two**_

They watched the boy climb the stairs into their kitchen. After several seconds, Maddie whispered, "Jack, why is this happening?"

"You don't think-" Jack started to say, some modicum of hope, or denial, still burning in his breast. "You don't think that could be-"

Maddie shook her head sharply. "No. _No_. We _saw_ him, Jack. We saw him die. We saw him turn." Pointing her finger at the stairs, she said, "It's like he said. Whoever that is, it isn't our son."

Her husband wilted again. He had been briefly returned to life when Maddie brought that impostor into their lab, but now he looked the same as he had for months, if not worse. She hated to see Jack that way; it was another reminder of what this world had taken from her.

"Do we believe his story?"

The way he asked that spoke a great deal. There was no question of the _possibility_ of the boy's story being true. After studying ghosts and alternate dimensions for the entirety of their careers, being asked to believe in an alternate timeline was no great leap. Instead, what Jack wanted to know was whether to accept that his purpose for being here was purely accidental, purely innocent, or whether there was a darker motive for his appearance.

Maddie narrowed her eyes. "I can believe he is from an alternate time. I don't believe that this is a coincidence. Think about it – we've theorized about natural portals, but no one has ever seen one appear. What are the chances of one 'just happening' to form under that boy's feet?"

Jack nodded his head slowly. "You're saying we can't trust him."

"Yes. Exactly."

"Well, what do we do with him?"

His wife pursed her lips. Scowling at the floor, she turned her thoughts over in the air. "We can't just turn him out. People have seen him."

"Tell them the truth," said Jack simply.

"How? If they believe us, what good would it do anyone? It would only serve to sew distrust and paranoia. But I don't think they _would_ believe us in the first place. They'd probably say that our grief has blinded us so much that we can't accept what is right before our eyes. They thought we were crackpots for years; it wouldn't take much to remind them of that…"

"But if we let them think Danny's back…?"

"It's a ray of hope. A sign that this world doesn't take everything from us. Maybe others that were lost are still out there." She waved a hand flippantly. "Et cetera."

Jack shrugged his slumped shoulders. Maddie suspected he did not approve of her suggestion to lie to the town or the cold rationale she gave for it. It didn't change her conviction. What remained of the citizens of Amity Park was a group of scared people, in a cage, surrounded by horrors, and the last time a conspiracy theory had gotten into their heads it had nearly destroyed everything.

"He said we got the Fenton Portal working," said Jack, gazing at the scrap-filled hole in the wall.

" _We_ didn't," Maddie reminded him.

"We would've, if not for the virus. He's proof of it."

"Jack," said Maddie sternly, "I know what you're thinking. We can't. We don't have the materials. We don't have the time. We don't have the power to even run it."

"I know." He sighed. "That was another life. A job for another Jack Fenton." He laughed when he realized the words were more literal than he had intended. "So, what do we do with him? He came here looking for our help."

"So he says."

"Whatever he says, he's still a sixteen-year-old boy. What kind of evil plans could he possibly have?"

"Anything is possible anymore, Jack. You know that."

"Okay, maybe he's evil. You said we can't get rid of him. We can't build the Portal either, so we can't send him back to wherever he came from. What do we do with him?"

Maddie scowled at the entrance to the lab. She didn't like it, but it was the only viable answer. "He'll have to stay here where we can keep an eye on him. No matter what, Jack, I don't want that boy out of our sight."

Each of their gazes snapped to the other's, simultaneously realizing that was exactly where the boy was now.

* * *

Danny waited in the living room, hunched over on the sofa, regretting his life choices. He wondered if he should have just flown around until a ghost portal popped up, and he wondered if it was too late to do that. But since the Fenton Portal had never been activated in this world, and Pariah Dark had never stretched the boundaries between worlds with his invasion, the chances of being in the right time and place as a natural portal were pretty slim.

Of course, there was also the _Plasmius_ Portal...

While he had never confirmed it, Danny had always gotten the impression that Vlad had based his portal off of stolen schematics for the Fenton Portal. It wouldn't be the first time Vlad built a device not one hundred percent a Plasmius original. Vlad _was_ a pretty decent inventor in his own right (in a mad scientist sort of way), but there had always been those inventions he'd not been able to get quite right - not without a little 'help' from his old college buddies or the scientists at Axion Labs.

Still, it was worth a shot. Maybe the Fentons had sacrificed completing their portal for the greater good, but to Vlad there was no greater good than himself. If anyone would have a working ghost portal in the apocalypse, it was him.

Other than finding a natural portal by a one-in-a-million chance, going to Wisconsin was looking to be Danny's best shot of getting home.

Because if he stayed here, his only choice would be to convince the Jack and Maddie of this world to finish their invention to send him back. Even if he did that, it would take the two scientists months of working non-stop to finish, considering they had all of the supplies and enough power to spare from the zombie-shield. That last part was doubtful; the Portal was a drain on Amity Park's power plants on a good day, let alone an apocalyptic one. But say they tried to pursue it – working in between all of their other responsibilities, maybe it would take a year. More than a year. If they had to scavenge the supplies, maybe several years. All to help a person who was _not_ their son but was instead a painful reminder of him...

Someone cleared their throat, and Danny whipped his head up. Jack and Maddie were standing just inside of the living room, looking wearier than he had ever seen them – weary, and _cold._ Danny had never seen his parents so lacking warmth; even when they hunted ghosts, it was with excitement or hatred burning hot inside of them. Was this what his own parents would be like if _he_ died? If Danny didn't go home to them, was this the people they would become?

"We talked about it," said Maddie. "I'm afraid there's nothing we can do to help you."

Danny sighed, disappointment gripping his heart tight. "I understand." He hung his head and ran his hands through his hair.

"I guess if you… if you want me to leave…" Even if the Plasmius Portal was a bust, Danny could still survive out there. With his powers, he wouldn't be in great danger from the zombies, so long as he kept his guard up. He could probably scavenge for food and meanwhile look for a natural portal… He stood up, shaking his head bitterly. "What am I saying? Of course I should leave. I'm sorry for coming here. I just made things worse."

"Wait," said Maddie, and for a moment hope sparked inside of him. "You can't go."

"I can't?" said Danny.

Maddie shook her head, and her lips tightened into a thin line. "Too many people have seen you. What would they think if it seemed like we let our son go back into that world? It would make many question our sanity and we would lose the respect we need to defend them."

The brief hope sputtered and went out. "Oh," said Danny weakly. "No, yeah, that makes sense. Um, what should I… does that mean, should I pretend to be…?"

"Only while outside of this house. Don't insult us by trying to step into his place with our full knowledge."

Danny held up his hands in defense. "I wouldn't dream of it!"

It didn't seem to placate her. Maddie's eyes narrowed, an expression intensified by the wrinkles accumulated there in this life. "We don't trust you."

"Yeah, you've made that abundantly clear," Danny grumbled, garnering another milk-curdling expression from his alternate-universe mother.

She opened her mouth to retort, but whatever she would have said was cut off by the opening of the front door. "Dad? I'm-"

There was a small shriek, and this universe's Jazz Fenton dropped the box she was carrying, dumping fruits and vegetables across the floor. She pressed her hands to her mouth and stared at Danny.

Maddie leaped forward, pulled her daughter into the house, and closed the door tightly behind her. Without wasting a second, she guided Jazz to Jack's side in a wide circle around Danny, as though protecting her from him - and yes, that's probably _exactly_ what she was doing. Jazz lowered her hands and gaped at Danny, looking like she wanted to pull away from her mother and embrace him. "Danny?" she whispered.

Danny was shaking. He looked to his almost-parents to take the lead, but they were watching him, waiting for him to speak, a warning lurking in his alternate mother's eyes. "No," he said. "I'm not…" Quickly, he told her the same story he had told her parents. As expected, by the end tears had welled in her eyes and were trailing over her cheeks.

Danny studied her while he talked. This Jazz, too, was not the Jazz from his memories. She wore camo pants, the legs stuffed into a heavy pair of brown boots, plus a sun-bleached checkered shirt, which was tucked into the top of her pants. Instead of her turquoise headband, the same one she had been wearing for years, a green bandana was tied around her forehead, to keep stray hair and sweat out of her eyes. Her hair, which had been long and flowing for as long as Danny could remember, was cut short, reaching only to her jaw line. Jazz's once pale complexion was now tanned several shades darker.

This Jazz was a worker. It made sense. Jazz was driven by a need to help people, and she liked to be as hands-on as possible. After admitting to Danny that she knew about his ghost powers, she thought she could help him by joining him in battle, despite being flat-out terrible at it.

"How is he going to get home?" Jazz asked her parents, once Danny had finished his story.

"For now," explained Maddie, "he will stay with us, until we know whether or not we can trust him."

It didn't necessarily mean much. Her words from only a few minutes before made it pretty clear that they already had their verdict. However, Danny was going to willfully interpret her statement as meaning he had some time to prove himself.

Hopefully he wouldn't need to. Hopefully he would be able to get out of their shield that night and make it to Vlad's mansion. Hopefully his trip to Wisconsin would be the end of this little visit to Zombie World. But better to be safe than sorry - sorry, and without a safe place to fall back on. So in the meantime, he would try not to make these Fentons hate him anymore than they already did.

"Why wouldn't we be able to trust him?" asked Jazz, frowning. "He's not _our_ Danny, but he's obviously still Danny! You must see it, too!"

"Jazz," snapped Maddie. "You of all people should know that strangers are not always what they appear."

His alternate-mom made a good point. Danny had consciously decided to keep his most important half a secret from them, so he was definitely not what he appeared to be. Also, he had no idea what they had been through or how many seemingly good people had betrayed them, as was the case in every end-of-the-world movie Danny'd ever watched. He and his friends had gotten into the habit of saying "Stranger danger!" every time someone new appeared in one of those movies, because they were nine times out of ten bad news. Heck, that was practically the story of his own life. How many newcomers to Amity Park wound up being ghosts, overshadowed by ghosts, or ghost hunters?

Jazz pulled away from her mother, scowling, and walked over to the box she had dropped earlier to collect the spilt vegetables.

Through all of this, Jack had been abnormally quiet. Danny glanced at the big man, trying to discern something from his softly troubled expression. Danny was used to his own dad being so goofy or headstrong that he wasn't entirely sure how to interpret 'quiet'. What did Jack think about all of this?

It was a very uncomfortable moment of silence encompassing them, broken only by the _thump_ of vegetables hitting the inside of Jazz's box. Danny swallowed and shuffled from one foot to the other. He finally mustered the courage to say something. "Let me prove myself to you."

"What do you mean?" said Jack, frowning.

"You don't think you can trust me," said Danny, quickly adding, "and I get that. Everything about me showing up is super weird, and I'd be suspicious, too, if I were in your place. So, let me prove myself to you. Let me help you guys! I can, I don't know, help scavenge for supplies, defend this place-"

"We're not going to let you handle a weapon, if that's what you are asking," said Maddie, entirely missing the point. "Besides, I doubt you'd last one minute against these creatures."

"Um, hello? _My_ Amity Park is constantly being attacked by superpowered ghosts from another dimension. I think I know a thing or two about fighting."

"We are not going to entrust the safety of our people to a stranger," Maddie said decisively, interrupting whatever her husband had started to say. "That's final."

"Then let me help in other ways!"

Arms crossed, Danny glared at his alternate self's mother, and she met him unblinkingly. The tension was palpable.

Just then, Jazz jumped between them, raising her hands in supplication. "Why doesn't Danny help me in the gardens? We could always use another hand."

" _Gardening_?" Danny screwed up his face, offended. "I'm telling you-"

Jazz looked at him over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised and mouth in a stern line. He understood - she was trying to help him, to get him an "in" here in Amity Park Z, and he was sticking his foot in it. "Or, gardening!" he said brightly, clasping his hands together over his chest and smiling falsely at Maddie. "I could totally help Jazz in the gardens."

Maddie's eyes flicked back and forth between the two teens. Clearly she did not like the arrangement, yet a better one was not presenting itself.

"Well, Jack?" she asked her husband.

The big man shrugged. "Sounds good to me."

"Okay then," said Jazz. She breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay. Well... why don't I take him around and show him _our_ version of Amity Park? I noticed a lot of people gathering and talking on my way here, so I'm sure rumor of him is spreading, and fast. It'll be good if they can see his face."

Maddie hummed, nodding. Pressing a fist against her chin, she studied Danny, like he was nothing more than an inhuman specimen. It was a familiar feeling - his own mother had stared at his ghost half in the same way. "We need to decide on a story."

"Um?" Danny raised his hand. Maddie, scowling, acknowledged him. "What about amnesia? Listen," he continued quickly. "I don't know anything about this world. I have no way to explain why I don't look like I've been living in the post-apocalypse for the past year. So, instead of trying to explain, how about I _can't_ explain?"

"It could work," Jazz tacked on. "Whatever Danny 'experienced' out there could have been so terrible that he entered a stage of dissociative amnesia."

"So terrible, and yet he had fresh clothing, running water, and a perfectly healthy diet?" Maddie's expression darkened - and it hadn't been sunshiney to begin with. "People will wonder where he came from, who he was with. If whoever they were had enough resources to give Danny a life of comfort, but were terrible enough to drive him to amnesia-"

"Or maybe something terrible just happened _to_ them," said Danny. "How about this - when I came to, everyone around me was dead. I had no idea what happened, so I gathered what supplies I had and struck out for Amity."

"Did you walk here?" countered Maddie. "Drive? From which direction?"

"I drove," said Danny confidently. "From somewhere outside of Minneapolis. Until the car I had ran out of gas about three hours' walk from here." He had lied so often since becoming a halfa that lying now felt like second nature.

"A small community in the suburbs that collapsed on itself," mused Jack. "It could work. We saw that happen more than once back in the early days of the outbreak."

"But how does that explain what _we_ saw?" demanded Maddie angrily, and tears broke over her face. She quickly scrubbed them away.

But the glimpse had been enough. Danny remembered the root of why he needed a cover story. _This_ Danny, their son, was dead, and the person stepping into his place was nothing more than a copy, cheapening the memory of the original. They were literally standing around scheming of a way to convince Amity Park that he was a dead person. Danny's irritation evaporated, and, sobered, he wished he could turn invisible. He glanced down at his arms to make sure he hadn't.

"Mom," said Jazz softly, placing a gentle hand on her mom's arm. "We saw him from the highway. It was a long way away. It wouldn't be a stretch to say we were mistaken." Jazz was crying now, too.

"We weren't!" bit out Maddie through clenched teeth.

"I know…"

At that moment, Danny hated himself. He felt like scum. He didn't have any right to be there. Instead of offering any more 'help', he stared at his shoes and waited to be told what to do next. If he had known he could count on the Plasmius Portal, he would have said "Screw it" and gone ghost right then and there and flown away. The repercussions of that couldn't have been worse than this.

Maddie, Jack, and Jazz talked for a few minutes longer; Danny did not care to know what they were saying. He was pulled out of his reverie by Jazz's gentle hand on his shoulder, and he raised his head to look at her. She was smiling, but the expression was tempered by the tension around her eyes.

"Are you ready to go?"

He nodded, leaping at the rope she'd offered for escape.

"Remember, Jazz," said Maddie, "he is not to be let out of your sight for a moment. If you lose him, call us immediately."

"Nothing is going to happen," said Jazz.

Maddie shuffled, arms crossed stiffly over her chest. She looked like she wanted to say more. All she did say was: "Be back by dinnertime."

As soon as the front door closed behind them, Danny bent over, resting his hands on his knees, and took several deep breaths.

"Are you okay?" asked Jazz softly.

"No," huffed Danny, and he straightened. "But don't worry about me. I don't have any right to complain. My situation is probably the least bad of anyone's."

Jazz seemed to disagree. "You just lost your home. They didn't have to be so harsh."

"I get why they are. I really do. I had no right to come here and open old wounds, and they have no obligation to help me."

"They have every obligation - you're their son."

"But I'm _not_ ," repeated Danny. He looked sidelong at this alternate-dimension Jazz, studying her expression. "I'm not your brother. I already have a sister, who's probably tearing apart my Amity Park to find me right now. Okay? Don't think of me as him."

"It's difficult not to," said Jazz, grimacing. "You look like him. Sound like him."

"Trust me, we're different enough." For example, this Danny had no urge to feast on human brains, unlike his counterpart would. But he also knew enough about himself from two years ago to know how much his personality had changed since that accident in the Portal. Leading a double life as a superhero could do that to a person.

Before Jazz could ask more about that, Danny turned his gaze to the street - to the remainder of Amity Park. The bright green shield glimmered against the sky, turning the whole city faintly emerald. Anyone who was out had stopped in their places to stare at the two Fentons, sharing whispered gossip behind their hands in between glances.

"They look like they've seen a ghost," chuckled Danny. Jazz frowned; of course, the joke was lost on her. In fact, it probably sounded like he was making light of her actually dead brother. He had never once claimed to be tactful, but at the moment he was making a complete ass of himself.

"Sorry," he muttered, his face flushing. "Wasn't thinking."

"You're going to have to start thinking," Jazz replied just as quietly. "Because from this point forward, you _are_ my brother."

He swallowed thickly. "Right."

After that, Jazz was incredibly professional, albeit in a bizarrely detached way, as she led him through the little safe haven. She took him to every vital location and explained the purpose and who was in charge of each facility. The school, for example, was not only a school now but also an orphanage for children who had lost their parents and a shelter for those who had lost their homes, for those whose homes had lain outside the perimeter of the shield and for whom there was no more room in the remaining houses. The hospital had been lost but there was still a functioning MANA clinic that was being sustained on supplies gathered from pharmacies and hospitals in the area. There was a church where the community's food was stored and doled out to the people; Danny noticed that this was guarded by two people wielding assault rifles who stood at either door. A third armed man stood at the door to the basement.

"That's where all of the extra z-rifles and ammo are kept," said Jazz, inclining her head to the guard. The man was too busy staring at Danny to notice.

"'Z-rifles?" echoed Danny. As far as he knew, it didn't take a special sort of anything to kill a zombie, so long as you went for the head. Bullets, arrows, pitchforks, rocks, silverware - heck, a person's thumbs, if they jabbed at the eyes deeply enough.

"When we got back to Amity Park," said Jazz, "that summer, when it happened… Things were bad." She slipped into one of the empty pews - one that wasn't being used for storage - and motioned for Danny to sit beside her. "Mom and Dad managed to get the ghost shield converted into a zombie shield pretty quickly, but by that time, so many people had already been lost. Those who were left barely had enough to survive. We needed to go back out and start gathering supplies, but there were only a few guns and not nearly enough bullets. Luckily, Axion Labs has such good security that it got out of this mess nearly unscathed. It's not in the shield, but Damon Gray helped us get inside the fence, and since then we've been able to use it for various things.

"You know how good Dad is with inventing weapons." Danny grunted his agreement. Even before the Fentons had seen their first ghost, Jack Fenton had created at least six different types of blasters with which to obliterate them. "Well, he designed a gun that could use basically anything as a bullet. Rocks. Plastic. Compressed garbage. As long as it's cut down to size and can fit in the gun. There isn't any need for gunpowder, either, because each gun has just a little bit of purified ectoplasm charging it."

That was… equal parts impressive and disconcerting. Danny found himself suddenly thankful that his father had never been recruited by the military and that the only things his own dad's weapons could harm were ectoplasmic entities from another dimension.

Jazz waved her hand, gesturing toward the three armed persons in the room. "So now all the guards have z-rifles."

Danny raised his brows. "Good to know."

Dozens of people stopped them during this tour, hardly able to find the words to ask the question that would sound either crazy or insensitive - "Isn't he supposed to be dead?" - instead standing in their path with wide and questioning eyes and waiting for the story. Danny let Jazz handle the explanations, which she did with the proper amount of joy, relief, and astoundment. She was a much better actor than _his_ Jazz, even with all the lies his Jazz told covering for him. She seemed to know exactly what these people wanted to hear, and instead of suspicion, they told Danny "Welcome back" and left with slightly hopeful smiles tugging at their lips.

"You're good at this," he commented after one such conversation.

"I have to be," she said, sober where she been wiping away tears of joy moments earlier. "I'm the closest thing to a psychiatrist these people have. It's my job to help them find a reason to wake up every day. Right now, you're that reason."

"Uh…" He took a moment to process that, but no, he was still lost. "I don't even know these people."

"But they know _you_ \- or they know about my brother, at the very least. And if he can come back to us after being gone for two years, maybe some of their family members will find their way here as well. I'm sure that's one of the reasons our parents… _my_ parents want to keep you around."

"I'm propaganda?" Danny's stomach twisted at that, although he could not pinpoint exactly why the thought made him so uncomfortable. Because it was a lie? Because Jazz had just admitted that she and her parents were using him?

He winced. Technically, he was also lying to and using them. It was a fair exchange.

"You haven't been here," said Jazz. "We're safe, but things aren't looking good."

That was a loaded sentence if Danny had ever heard one. He wasn't sure he was ready to know, or if he wanted to know at all. It would only make abandoning this place and these people so much harder.

"Whatever," he gruffed. "I get it. Do what you have to."

The last place Jazz took him that day was the memorial in the park. He knew why it had been saved for last - it was going to be super depressing. Already he was having flashbacks to another memorial in another timeline.

 _'Gone, but not forgotten_.'

As Jazz strode into the park, Danny reached out and grabbed her wrist. She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. "Do you not want to do this?"

There was no judgement in her tone. She would not look down on him if he chickened out of facing the reality of this world.

"No, I need to do this," he insisted. "Just… before we go in, tell me. How many people are left?"

Amity Park had been a city of about forty thousand. Now those who remained lived within a single mile of it.

"Eighty-seven," said the alternate Jazz. "You make eighty-eight."

Danny inhaled deeply through his nose and nodded. "Okay."

He wasn't ready, but there would never come a time when he would be. He told Jazz to go ahead, and he trailed somewhat numbly behind.

The memorial was spread throughout the park. Once the zombie shield had been put up, someone clearly put a lot of time and care into this project. Across the lawn, among the fountain, the benches, the swingsets and water fountains, were huge cement blocks about four feet wide and four feet tall. They sat on circular cement pedestals, raising them about two feet off of the ground so people would not have to crouch so low to read them. They were not decorated in any way, which did not take away from the reverent air they instilled.

The park itself was empty, besides Jazz and Danny. The sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon, casting the memorial in orange.

Danny approached the nearest block. When he was close enough, he could discern rows and rows of names that had been carved into each side of the cube. All were last names ending in the letter "W". Glancing around, he counted twenty-five other blocks and realized there was one for each name of the alphabet.

Apprehensively, he scouted for the names ending with "M". Jazz took a seat on one of the benches and watched him in respectful silence.

He found it near the swingset. Danny could feel his pulse quickening, a knot forming in his throat. This side of the block was 'Me-" through "Mo-". He walked around to the left.

"Mabary… Macafee… Macartney…" He ran his fingers over the names etched out of the stone. They were neat and tidy, but there had been no stencils used. A single person had carved out each and every name in their own handwriting, spending who knew how many weeks or months working on this. "Madin… Maggiore… Malaney…" There were so many. So many names.

"Manson." His fingers froze on the rough letters. His breath caught in his throat, and it felt like his heart had even stopped.

"Manson," he repeated, a whisper, releasing the breath slowly. He read the names carefully:

 _Ida Manson_

 _Pamela Manson_

Sam's name wasn't there. Neither was her father's. It was unfortunate that her mother didn't make it, and crushing that her grandmother hadn't - Sam would have been extremely close to her. But, selfishly, he was soaring at the knowledge that he wouldn't have to face another timeline in which Sam Manson didn't exist.

Danny spent the next half an hour wandering among the tombstones - for that was what these were. There might not have been any bodies, but this was one big graveyard. A lot of the big names in town were on there, like Mayor Sanchez, Lance Thunder, and Tiffany Snow. He learned that most of his classmates were gone, although Mr. Lancer had survived. The A-list was down to Valerie and Dash - no Kwan, no Star, not even Paulina. Valerie he wasn't surprised about; she was tough as nails, even if she wouldn't have known it before the outbreak.

He saw that Dash had lost both of his parents. He was surprised at how sad that made him feel. He didn't like Dash at all, not even a little, but that was a fate he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.

 _Well…_ Danny shook his head. Nope, he would not even wish for Vlad's parents to be ripped apart and cannibalized by zombies. If Vlad even had parents. It was difficult to imagine Vlad ever having been a child. He seemed like the kind of person who was grown by a mad scientist in a lab.

 _Whatever_. Danny pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. His brain was starting to lead him strange places.

He supposed there was no putting it off any longer. He forced his feet to take him back to the block with the names starting with "F", which he had bypassed several times already. He knew he needed to check in on Tucker, but he also knew that if Sam was okay, there was no way Tuck wouldn't be. No, it was another name he was avoiding.

And there it was, drawing his eyes as though magnetized:

 _Daniel Fenton_

It felt… strange, to say the absolute least... to be looking at his own grave. Even though he wasn't actually dead, it was still dredging up a lot of existential feelings that he wasn't sure he wanted to deal with. Against his will, he started imagining what the other him must have been going through, right at the end. The fear. The pain. The hopeless knowledge that he was going to die, and no one could save him.

How had he gone out? From a bite or scratch and days of waiting for the end, in fevered delirium? Was that even how bites worked here? Or did people turn in seconds? Was that why his family had been so far away from him when they had seen him turn?

Or worse - had he been eaten alive?

And had he died like that - completely alone?

Danny gagged, fighting down the urge to vomit. He tore his eyes away from the name, only for them to land on three other names, ones he had not expected to see, ones that turned his legs to jelly and sent him to his knees.

 _Angela Foley_

 _Maurice Foley_

 _Tucker Foley_

* * *

 _A/N: Yes._

 _..._

 _I am having too much fun dropping hints about what happened to Other Danny. I've written that scene already, and, well, let's just say this Danny is correct in his urge to cry/vomit._

 _It's not been explicitly explained yet, but the Fentons were on a Fenton Family Road Trip when the outbreak hit, which is why they weren't in Amity Park at the time. More on that to come._

 _Btw, no more update schedules. I realized that trying to plan to update is nothing short of inviting the heavens to smite me with lightning bolts of doom, so I'm not going to jinx my life again. These last few months have been hell, and that started shortly after my last Treading Water update, in which I'm pretty sure I said, "See y'all soon! La-dee-doop-dee-doo~~"_

 _So I will just say this: "_ Hum hai rahi pyaar ke; phir milenge chalte chalte" (We are travelers on the path of love; we will meet again as time goes on - from the movie Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi)

 _Thanks to:_ _Black Upon An Icy Sky, roseofalltrades, Guest, GhostWriterGirl-1, SofiPhan29, AlecGateway, FallingToast, AFloatingShoppingList, MsFrizzle, dragondancer123, Foxprints, Glowing Loudly, Pour, MickeyNC, Death of Snipers, ImpudentMiscegenation, dannyphannypack, Phantomfray, and Catzooa for their reviews of Chapter 1, and to everyone who has added this to their favs and alerts!_

 _T.F.C~_


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